Women Get In on the Action in Video Games

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CreditLaurent Cilluffo

By Stephen Heyman

Sept. 10, 2014

Video games have long ceased to be a chiefly male pastime. As popular free games like Candy Crush and Farmville have taken over social media and mobile phones, the number of women playing video games has soared over the past several years. Since 2011, the world’s female gamer population has increased by 37 percent to 820 million, according to the Dutch games research firm Newzoo.

In the United States, a new survey from the Entertainment Software Association shows that women represent a record 48 percent of the gaming population. That’s roughly consistent with the latest figures from Australia (47 percent), Europe (45 percent) and Japan (43 percent).

While video game developers see their worldwide market approaching a kind of gender parity, there are some significant differences in the types of games preferred by each gender. Men favor immersive, narratively complex games laced with violence that have a steep learning curve, according to Peter Warman, the chief executive of Newzoo. The most popular video game franchise among male players in France, Britain, the United States and Germany is “Max Payne,” a noirish third-person shooter game about a fugitive NYPD detective. The game includes a “kill cam,” which, according to GameSpot, shows the player’s ammunition “soaring through the air and striking its target in grisly detail.”

Women, on the other hand, prefer so-called “casual” games that are easy to learn but complex to master, Mr. Warman said. The most popular franchise among women is the rhythm game “Just Dance,” designed for Nintendo’s Wii platform, in which players mimic dance moves set to popular songs by artists like Katy Perry and Kylie Minogue. The runner-up among women is the Candy Crush Saga, a puzzle game that has become ubiquitous on Facebook and smartphones. The game, which is played by around 90 million people worldwide each day and was just released last month in China, makes an estimated $1 million per day from the sale of 99-cent credits that allow players to keep playing.

Despite the success of money-making methods like these, women are still seen as a less lucrative part of the video game market because they are much less likely to buy the expensive “core games” designed for PCs and consoles like Xbox, Mr. Warman said. That could explain why only an estimated 15 percent of playable characters in video games are female.